Critiques

My Creative Writing class is fairly small, 14 students. There was a lot of "competition" to get in - there were more than forty students on the waitlist.

The way the class works is that three people are chosen to be workshopped each week (following a couple of weeks of general stuff, of course; the first full assignment was due two or three weeks in). Each of those people reads her essay aloud to the class. After each essay comes ten or fifteen minutes for the class to write critiques (during this time the author can read, or go to the loo, or hunt down the erstwhile vending machines...). A half-hour or so of discussion follows, for which the author is present but may not talk. At the end the author has a few minutes to ask questions or clarify things. Then it's on to the next essay.

My essay for the first assignment was selected to be workshopped on the first day of workshops. The essay is more or less about high school and it more or less followed the assignment (my professor did say that she thought that the prompt had gotten in the way of my writing the essay... heh. Oh well, all that means is that when I revise I don't have to include certain things).

I had a ton of trouble getting this one started, and, let's face it, it's not a particularly good essay. I knew that when I turned it in - I also knew that it would probably be chosen for workshop anyway. It does have strong points, after all, and there are some things that I do quite well when I write narratives. At any rate, it was chosen.

The workshop went fine. The class made some really good, helpful comments.

Later that evening I read through their written critiques. I sort before I read - I like to put the critiques that I think will be the most helpful at the bottom of the pile (kind of like dessert...). The system's crude, but hey, it's pretty accurate.

Most of the critiques were very tactful, very carefully phrased - this is what worked and why, this is what is not as strong and why. Tact is especially important for this class because it's the personal essay - nonfiction, real experiences. Again, most of the critiques were really quite helpful (there was one that wasn't, near the "slush" end of the pile - I doubt it was intentional, but one critique was really skeptical - critiquing not my writing but my experience. I wtf-ed it and moved on). The strange thing, though, was that reading them made me feel terrible. I'm no stranger to this kind of workshop and critique; this is my fourth CW class here. They weren't even bad critiques; there were a lot of positive comments (and even most of the suggestions were useful (and, what's more, right)). It's probably just because it's nonfiction rather than fiction. A lot harder to warp things to suit your purposes when you're writing nonfiction, unless you want to lie (which I don't). There wasn't anything in the critiques that hurt - just the overall experience.

Something to keep in mind, I guess.